


in the crystalline knowledge of you

by illuminatedbystarlight



Category: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Period-Typical Homophobia, compulsory heterosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-30 04:07:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17216714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedbystarlight/pseuds/illuminatedbystarlight
Summary: It can’t be that different to what men and women do every day, can it? Falling in love must be much the same whoever you are, everywhere, no matter who you love.





	in the crystalline knowledge of you

It is quite natural to notice other women; Midge Maisel is sure of this. After all, doesn’t her mother comment on Jayne Mansfield’s dazzlingly blonde ‘do? Don’t the girls at the cosmetics store gossip through their breaks about whose lipstick is unflattering and whose necktie is perfect? And her school classmates could hardly stop themselves from snickering and _ooh_ -ing and _ahh_ -ing at each other in hallways. Yes, she is sure it is only natural to notice other women: their hair, their smiles, their skirts and how they hug their figures just so.

She often finds herself lost in another woman when riding home on the subway. One day a stately older woman with a carefully matched lavender ensemble evoking Kim Novak and sitting silently, watching the world rush past the windows. Another day a young woman sandwiched between business folk, platinum curls bouncing softly with the jostling of the carriage. Sometimes they catch her gaze and she can feel her cheeks heat even as she looks down at lap. Sometimes she thinks they must watch at her too, when she isn’t looking, after all she has always been fashionable, proper and pretty. They must look at her, and a pleasant warmness settles in her insides at the thought.

If she notices women at other times, in other ways, call it a personal idiosyncrasy. She’s very aware, yes that’s what it is. She’s very aware and _imaginative_ , her mind is its own creature. She just can’t help but look and watch and think and wonder. How soft would that woman’s pin straight hair be, mussed under her fingers? How would her smile look, if she were smiling at Midge? How long did she spend at home in her bedroom choosing her outfit and why that dress, because it accentuated her chest so wonderfully?

If that same woman, if perhaps quite a few women, invite themselves into her dreams; beautiful and soft figures of light and longing that she can never remember but that leave her awakening to hot skin and bunched sheets, nobody else needs to know about it. It’s just another little thing to file away somewhere deep inside to examine on a later day that might never come. She’s too busy to sit down and confront these thoughts, unbidden as they bubble up inside of her. Pre-occupied with the never-ending duties of life, proving herself, proving everyone else wrong. She is a good woman, she was a good wife, she has tried her best at motherhood; she kept up a good life for everyone else and now is the time to seize it for herself with both hands.

(She never loved Joel like she loves the stage and the bright-hot spotlight. Their marriage was always more convenience than true companionship. They put on a good show: He called her a doll, could touch her softly and bring her little gifts; she would have his dinner ready every night and keeps an appealing house with zest and zeal, impressing all the right people. They should have been movie stars for how they played their roles of the dutiful lovers, like stop-motion puppets going through a play. Somehow Joel never drew her eye like the women on the subway, or the women walking past her on the streets, the wives at parties. He was handsome, healthy and trim, he could cajole her into a night of quiet gasps between them, but she never dreamed of him. When he leaves her, and she leaves their life together, it is at once a tragedy and a blessed freedom. Despite the grating shame and awkwardness, she has never felt so hopefully about her life. The electric way her pulse thrums in her body when she tries out a new punchline, part excitement and part nerves, is addictive.)

In a fit of cosmic humour of course it is a woman who puts her on the stage and helps her stumble her way towards this new dream of comedy.

Susie Myerson is a miracle of a person, this is something else Midge Maisel is sure of, and of this she needs to look to no one else for confirmation. Susie, inimitable and bold yet never demanding of her own limelight. Susie, who for some unknowable reason seems to feel a pull towards Midge in kind.

They’re partway through their respective meals of salad and a hamburger with shared fries, late-night diners now being a regular haunt for Midge, when Susie calls Joel a ‘tight-assed schmuck’. The word doesn’t come out quite coherently muffled by the burger and her unfamiliarity with Yiddish but she puts the right spirit into it, gesticulating with a napkin about Midge deserving better and self-serving men. Midge appreciates the show of solidarity even as she pointedly turns the conversation away from the subject of her personal life, stomach turning tight and roiling uncomfortably, fingers suddenly twitchy as if wanting to grab something. Susie lays her hands down again, just out of reach.

Midge’s new friend and business manager is not the usual type of woman that catches her eye, in fact she’s the very opposite, indeed the opposite of all Midge has been taught is right and proper and attractive in a woman. She has never seen another woman like her. And perhaps that is why Midge can never quite stop stealing glances, always finding something new to wonder over. Susie is portly, yes, there is a definite rotundness to her form beyond coveted buxomness but the word Midge always recalls is _robust_. She watches Susie clear away tables and clean glasses, watches the way her arms flex and stretch, the grip of her fingers, the solidness of her stance, and she wants to marvel at the strength she sees there. Susie is very short, that is also true. She is nothing like the leggy and voluptuous models adorning billboards and posters. But Midge likes that, likes the way it doesn’t stop her from striding down streets and through late-night crowds at the Gaslight as if she hadn’t a fear in the world, the way it makes her the perfect height for Midge to put an arm around her shoulder so easy. Susie is vulgar, and unquestionably older than her but doesn’t that just add to her character? Susie is a survivor, the very image of a self-possessed woman who knows who she is and what she wants and Midge is captivated by her. Itching to spend just one more day, night, minute around her; to brush her shoulder as if she might finally understand that special something that makes Susie so magnetic, that it might affect her too.

 And Susie cross-dresses. It is the first thing anybody might notice about her and yet the elephant in the room during their rendezvous’.  One of a few untouchable topics during their conversations (just like Susie’s love life, her history, why she is so alone). Midge isn’t so naïve -- everyone has heard about the bar raids, knows the tell-tale signs of the sort of person that might frequent such bars. She understands that Susie is risking arrest daily, thinks she might understand why in an abstract sort of why. As if looking through a stained-glass window or across a foggy landscape.  When she thinks of the women that she has seen walking across the street, at parties, at work, she thinks she can see the appeal. It makes sense, in a topsy-turvy sort of way that draws a curious warm and tight feeling into her chest, has her clearing her throat as if to unstick words caught just out of range of her tongue. They don’t talk about it. Susie drops comments here and there, always just vague enough to have an excuse for anything Midge might ask, but she only ever hums and sips her drink. If in contrast to so much else Susie is so strikingly unashamed as to look how she does, act how she does, then she only feels stupid to ask questions. Somehow, she is convinced she should already know the answers. It can’t be that different to what men and women do every day, can it? Falling in love must be much the same whoever you are, everywhere, no matter who you love.

(Not that she would know much about true love. She still thinks about Joel from time to time but has never felt an all-consuming passion like in the songs or movies. Resolutely never thinking about the girl in college with the auburn hair and rose broach pinned to her lapel that made her think of Ingrid Bergman and sweet summer nights spent dissecting literature. She disappeared with those summer nights after graduation, when they were shoved back into the reality of a post-war America and the world of family expectations.)

And so, she goes about her days as she always has for month after month. Noticing women but never as much as she notices Susie: the haphazard way she ties her dark hair back, the roughness of the skin on her hands, the wrinkles around her eyes, the way she wears her leather jacket with more charisma than any man Midge has ever seen attempt to. How she speaks as if she’s making some proclamation, not polished like a politician but full of gumption like someone with the will to actually accomplish things. As if she decided she’s going to change the world one day, even if just this little corner of New York. Midge thinks of what Susie said in the diner, about not wanting to be insignificant, and so fiercely wishes she could make her understand that she matters to her so very much. It’s Susie joining her in her dreams, leaving her flustered and frustrated in the dark with fleeting memories of phantom touches. The itch she feels deepens, unscratchable, coursing through her blood, and something slides into place all of a sudden. The final puzzle piece needed for her to make sense of herself. Now she wants to ask Susie so many questions that she hasn’t got half the words for, only feelings and the knowledge that other people feel it too, she hopes. That Susie feels it. That she might feel it for Midge, she hopes.

She thinks she knows now that things really aren’t so different, has never understood less the aggressive pushback, the speeches and laws and attacks, nor been more in awe of Susie’s personal strength as she approaches the Gaslight without a performance slot yet still brimming with an electric energy, resisting the urge to bite her lip and ruin her lipstick, dressed in her favourite coat and that black number Susie had been so taken about.

The first question she asks Susie when they’re sequestered at a corner of the bar, voice as smooth as during her best routines, hands shaking ever so slightly around her drink, is: “Will you go out with me?”

Susie’s entire body seems to stutter for a moment, as if expecting a punchline or a punch. And suddenly Midge realises that if Susie might as well be wearing a billboard proclaiming her nature, then she herself is a soldier dressed in camouflaged fatigues. A spy hidden so well in enemy territory that she had convinced even herself. Susie might have flinched because she thought Midge had carelessly worded an invitation to something they already do, or worse, she thought she was being mocked.

Midge also realises that now she has the bravery to reach out and touch Susie’s hand, just the brush of a knuckle, the ghost of a handhold, just enough to say _this isn’t a joke, please stay, please don’t run away, or make me leave_.

“Susie, I’d like to—” she fumbles for a second, there are so many things she’d like to do, so many scenarios that have already played over in her mind, some so juvenile in their simplicity and others almost perverse with lust, so many things they can’t say around others, “go out to the park, go to the movies. One of the other—the other bars. Anything, as long as it’s with you.”

Susie doesn’t quite turn away but reaches for Midge’s grasshopper cocktail and gulps it down like she’s desperate for something else for her mouth to do other than speak. When the glass is empty, she slaps a hand down against the bar counter. “Fuck. You know you almost killed me? You are going to kill me one day.” Pause, as if the earth’s very rotation has stopped for one solitary moment, just for them. The music and chatter from the rest of the bar buzzes around them like static. “Fuck. Fuck.” She’s muttering now, whispering, meeting Midge’s eyes only every other syllable, fingers anxiously curling against the wood of the bar, her jacket zip. Midge has never seen Susie like this before, hardly dreamed it could happen, and she would apologise, would leave and never come back except that she knows if Susie were really upset at her she wouldn’t hesitate to let her know it, there would be shouting and wild gestures and impressively inventive cursing.

“Yes.” Susie’s voice isn’t shaking anymore.

And now it’s Midge’s turn to freeze, to feel her heart skip a beat and flutter against her sternum. Wondering for the merest moment if this is truly real, if she really wants to try this.

“Yes?” She sounds like a child just told they can get the biggest candybar in the store, doesn’t even try to hold back her own smile.

“Yes. Yes! Yes, I’ll take ya for a picnic in the park, or to one of those sappy films.” Susie’s voice is still quiet, but she’s got her usual smirk back, and she’s looking straight at Midge with a new wonderment in her eyes despite the faint pinkness creeping up her neck and on to her cheeks.

When they sit back down again, twin rum and cokes in hand, Midge can’t help herself nudging Susie’s shoulder. 

"I did tell you that you wouldn't need that German broad."

**Author's Note:**

> My First foray into the TMMM fandom and an attempt at feeling out my own little AU for them, although I also plan to write within canon.
> 
> The final line is a reference to Susie saying that unless she gets rich enough to "hire some German broad" to walk her around, she'll be alone for the rest of her life.


End file.
